


Hope

by stereolightning (phalaenopsis)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 22:46:43
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,016
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1165489
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/phalaenopsis/pseuds/stereolightning
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Remus' mother sometimes doubted whether magic was all it was cracked up to be.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Hope

Hope never slept at full moon anymore. She brewed strong coffee and paced the narrow corridor outside Remus' locked room. Sometimes she watched him through the scrying glass Lyall had installed in the door, but mostly she listened, heart shattering inside her body, to the screams followed by puppyish yips followed by lonely howls. 

What was the point of magic if it could not prevent a child's suffering? If, in fact, it was the cause of suffering? _Sod magic, then_ , she thought.

It was Saturday, and Lyall was in Brussels, searching still for a healer who might have a cure. At this point, however, Hope would have settled for a Muggle doctor, or maybe an exotic witch doctor with a pierced nose, or really anybody who could ease her son's monthly agony. But no such person was in evidence. At dawn, she unlocked the door, the charmed key fighting against her magic-less fingers, and found her son, now nine years old and longer-limbed every day, curled up on a quilt. He blinked at his pale, closed fists. Moments ago they had been claws. He seemed to be puzzling over this. He flexed his fingers weakly and then looked up at her. He looked like a songbird that had smashed into a window and broken its wings.

She sat down, placed the mug of cocoa she had been holding on the floor, and propped him against her. She smoothed down his wild hair – wavy and light brown, like hers – and put the warm mug to his lips.

For a long time they sat like this, and he drank, and he whispered a hoarse thank you, and she wished he would have saved his breath. When he had been smaller, he had accepted her care with limp, mute gratitude. Lately, though, he had changed – he wasn't resisting her, exactly, but she sensed that he was trying to hold himself straight, to master himself, to need her less badly. Normal boyhood growing-up behavior, probably, but most other boys weren't broken and rebuilt bone-by-bone every twenty-eight days. 

When the cocoa was gone, he fell asleep, and she carried him to bed, his bare, cold toes tapping against her with every step.

...

At half-past eleven, Remus woke and padded quietly into the kitchen, where she sat at the table, surrounded by a dozen wizarding books – herbariums, encyclopedias, even a few school textbooks. He sat in the chair beside her.

He turned over one of the books she had stacked on the table and read the spine. “ _One Thousand Magical Herbs and Fungi._ What are you reading this one for?”

“Ideas,” she said. “Clues.” Because maybe there was something in one of these books, something they'd overlooked, something that would help him. You didn't have to be a wizard just to do research about this sort of thing.

She poured him another cup of cocoa and added a few drops of dittany, and then the spoon stirred itself, its shiny steel handle twirling in slow circles. “That you, doing that?” she asked.

He nodded. She chuckled.

“Have a look in that book and see if you see anything about werewolves, or – mmm, are they called Animagi, the people who can turn into animals?”

“Yes.”

“Have a look for that, too. Anything you think might be useful. And we know about dittany. Maybe there's something else like that. And eat, while you're at it,” she said, sliding a plate of toast at him.

He opened the book again and smoothed down the pages, which bore an illustration of some particularly violent-looking snapdragons. He studied the text and the picture, both faded. As she watched, though, the ink darkened and the colors brightened under his fingers. The snapdragons changed from pale puce to vivid orange, and then shook their blossom heads like whinnying horses.

“That you again?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said, mouth half-full of bread. “Didn't mean to. It just happens.”

Magic could be beautiful like this, couldn't it. Terrible, too, and in some ways quite inefficient, but it could be lovely, or even breathtaking. She supposed magic itself was neither good nor bad; the caster and the context were what made it so.

She smiled at Remus. “What else can you do?”

He scrunched up his nose, puzzled. “Am I allowed?”

“Yes, I think you're allowed. You're not eleven yet,” she said.

“But, Mum. I won't be going to school. I don't think the normal rules apply to me.”

She folded her hands carefully on the table and looked right at him, at his post-moon pallor and blue pyjamas. “One way or another, we are getting you an education. The Muggle world, the wizarding world – wherever you end up, there are always going to be problems that need intelligent, educated people to solve them. And anyway, I don't think the rules apply to me, either, because I can't do any of the things you can, and I live with two wizards, and so far nobody's erased my memory.” Then she raised one eyebrow. “At least, as far as I know.” 

Mischief flickered in his eyes. “Maybe we have. How would you know?”

“I'll just have to trust you,” she said drily, playing along. 

He gave her his first true smile of the morning, and for the first time in hours, she felt the tension behind her ribs relax. The electric lights above their heads pulsed, their glow butter-yellow. She knew that was his doing, too. 

This was not the life she had expected – raising a magical child with a violent affliction, and grasping for answers that might never be found. But since when did anybody end up with the life they had planned? Her brother Hector had planned to be an archaeologist, but he had died at Normandy during the war.

Remus returned his attention to the book in front of him. He turned a page, and another wilted illustration quivered and bloomed, this one becoming incendiary pink. He read on, with an intensity that belied his fatigue.

“I haven't poisoned that cocoa, you know,” she said, pushing his mug at him.


End file.
